Now let's take a look at the CORBA runtime architecture. I think you'll see that it's remarkably similar to RMI: both use the notions of stubs and skeletons to insulate clients and remote objects from networking details. One difference is that CORBA uses IIOP to transmit method requests while RMI has it's own private protocol. However, Sun has promised that a future release of RMI will also support IIOP. That will make it easier for network administrators to configure firewalls and the like, especially for installations that are using both CORBA and RMI.
However, the development steps are quite a bit different for CORBA and RMI. We will next spend time looking at the differences.